Blowing new life into feedback

A conversation or a survey?

Take a conversation, one on one or in a focus group. You can ask follow-up questions, so you hear what someone really means. But you only talk to a few people and it takes a lot of time. Now take a survey. It reaches thousands of people at once and gives you numbers you can compare. The catch is that you never really talk to anyone, because everybody works through the same list.

Febaso grew out of research in the field into the feedback loop: how you collect feedback, map it, analyse it and report back what you did with it. We took a separate look at education, where evaluations have a fixed place. We wanted to know which steps organisations go through today and where it chafes.

What struck us is that it has been done more or less the same way for ten to twenty years: a survey, or a few focus groups and interviews. Some things were added, such as dynamic questions where the answer to one question decides which you get next, but it did not go much further than open questions and scale questions.

What a survey leaves behind

A survey is good with numbers. You see how many people are satisfied and what is rising or falling. The story behind those numbers you often miss, for two reasons.

1. You cannot ask a follow-up. A survey is a fixed set of questions. When someone wanders off in an answer, that is exactly where they show what they care about and what they want to get off their chest. That is where the useful part is, but with a fixed list you walk right past it.
2. Nobody can read it all. Every survey produces open answers, and with hundreds or thousands of them reading is no longer feasible. In conversations with people who do this work we heard how that goes: around ten thousand responses come in each month, and every now and then someone clicks through a sample to see what is in them. The rest stays unread, even though all those people made the effort to say something.

Many professionals told us they would actually rather have a personal conversation, because then they can go deeper. So why do they still send a survey? Because you cannot talk to everyone.

The conversation, but with everyone at once

That brought us to the question of how to get the best of both. We lined up the whole feedback loop: collecting, mapping, analysing and reporting back. For each step we looked at what happens today and what is possible with today's technology. For years that question had no answer, because you could not hold a conversation with everyone at once. With AI you now can.

So we built Febaso around an AI interview. Say someone writes: ‘the schedule was a mess’. A survey moves on to the next question. An AI interview asks: ‘Where did you notice that most?’ That gives you the depth of a conversation with everyone who takes part.

After that, AI also takes over the work that eats most of the time. The answers are sorted into themes and reports are drafted for you. You start from the overview and dive into the details where it matters, instead of reading thousands of answers yourself and sticking labels on them.

Feedback that does not disappear into a drawer

There is one more step that often drops out: telling people what you did with their feedback. A feedback loop is supposed to go round, but usually it stays a straight line. Whoever never hears what happened with their feedback is less likely to give it next time. Many organisations see response rates fall and we think that plays a part.

That is why closing the loop is the last step in ours. You map per theme what you do with the feedback and report it back to the people who raised it. That keeps all your feedback in one place.

It works both ways. People who hear that something was done with their feedback feel heard and are glad to give feedback again. And you get more targeted handles for improving, because people tell you exactly what you want to know.

For everyone who really wants to listen

We build this for companies and large institutions that want to listen well to their customers at scale. Think of education, where thousands of evaluations come in that nobody can read in full, of associations that want to know why members drift away, of HR wanting to know what is going on on the work floor and of teams working on customer satisfaction. It is about customers, students, members and employees, in short about anyone you want to keep engaged and satisfied.

“There is no such thing as negative feedback. Even feedback that is meant very negatively shows exactly where you can improve.”

We see feedback as a free tip for growing, and we want to make it something people look forward to, both giving and receiving. Suppose companies improve by five or ten percent with this way of working. That can have a large impact on the economy and on people's wellbeing. That is what we do it for.

Curious?

Curious what Febaso could do for you? Or do you just want to talk about how you collect feedback? Plan an intro and we will look together at what is possible.

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